Very different assumptions guide the efforts of social scientists and comparative legal scholars interested in the development process. These assumptions form paradigms; the paradigms guide and structure research problem selection, choices of concepts to be used, and even the form and content of evidence held to be admissible. For instance, a political scientist may treat the legal system of a transitional society as the outgrowth or a function of cultural, social, economic, and political environment, but the legal scholar may not be comfortable with this wholly dependent placement of his analytic slice of “reality.” Social scientists increasingly accept basic aspects of the value system of science. This requires a concern for making generalizations which may be linked to theoretical constructs, and which are empirically testable in such a way as to allow intersubjective evaluation. Description, explanation, and prediction are typically cited as a social scientist's aims. “Relevance” is a term we hear much of today, but unless a social scientist is content to ignore the imperatives of the value system of science, relevance must remain a fundamental, from that of the social scientist. A. Singham's work furnishes an opportunity to reflect on these considerations.